Current Administrative Roles:

Current Research:

I am particularly interested in the development of the structure and form of buildings in the crucial period between AD 900 and 1250. I am completing a book on the way in which timber buildings were constructed in this period using the evidence from excavations.I am also working on a further book providing an interdisciplinary cultural history of the medieval house in England. I have published various studies of buildings in this period, and am currently working with Nick Hill (English Heritage) on an examination of Scolland's Hall, Richmond and its wider implications. An edition of late fifteenth-century accounts, which includes details of building work on the manor of Mote in Iden, East Sussex, was published by the Sussex Record Society in June 2011.

2. Development of rural landscapes

I have worked on various aspects of the English landscape, but my current work is examining the character of the late medieval and early modern rural landscape of Ireland. I am continuing a field survey of settlements and field boundaries on the Antrim plateau, which is particularly rich in remains. Earlier published studies examined transhumance and the conceptualization of Irish rural settlements.

3. Fishing and trading places in the north Atlantic

I have been working on fishing and trade in the North Atlantic in a siers of projects with Dr Natascha Mehler (University of Vienna)and Endre Elvestad (Stavanger Museum). We initially completed four seasons of survey examining sites in Reykjanes, Snæfellsnes and the West Fjords in Iceland. In 2008 we extended our work to Shetland, excavating a trading sites at Gunnister Voe. We undertook further survey and excavation in 2009 and 2010. Some of this work is featured in a film made for the German channel, ZDF. In August 2011 we excavated the Hanseatic trading site of Avaldsnes in Norway. We are working on the Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft-funded project led by Natascha Mehler on Harbours in the North Atlantic (HaNoA). We surveyed sites in Norway and the Faroes in 2013, and worked in Greenland and Shetland in 2014. The final season of fieldwork in 2015 will be in Iceland.

Publications:

M. F. Gardiner. 2014. An archaeological approach to the development of the late medieval peasant house, Vernacular Architecture 45, 16-28.

N. Mehler and M. F. Gardiner. 2013. On the verge of colonialism: English and Hanseatic trading sites in the north Atlantic islands, in P. E. Pope and S. Lewis-Simpson (eds), Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Permanence and Transition in New Found Lands (Society for Post-Medieval Arcaheology monograph 7), 1-14. Woodbridge: Boydell.

M. F. Gardiner. 2013. Stacks, barns and granaries in Early and High Medieval England: crop storage and its social and economic implications, in A. Vigil-Escalera, G. Bianchi and J. A. Quirós Castillo (eds), Horrea, Barns and Silos. Storage and Incomes in Early Medieval Europe, 23-38. Vitoria-Gasteiz: University of the Basque Country.

External Grant Funding:

Grants have been received from the DFG (German Funding Council) for survey work on Haneatic sites in Shetland (2009); the Heritage Council for work by Tatjana Kytmannow on the Leean Mountain survey (2008); the Society for Medieval Archaeology (2008) towards fieldwork in Iceland; Royal Irish Academy (2007) for a grant for the visit of Dr Natascha Mehler from the University of Vienna to work on trading sites in Iceland; and from the British Academy for a ‘Reappraisal of English domestic stone buildings’ (2005).